in other Middle Eastern souks. Incense burns while some scratchy recordings of Arabic music play on loudspeakers. I had assumed that one could only purchase frankincense here, but myrrh, sandalwood, and musk are also on sale. In fact, I count dozens of kinds of incense, native perfumes, and aromatic herbs being offered, not merely to tourists but to Omanis as well.
It may be a leap for a Westerner to make, but in the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, incense is regarded as a form of nourishment. There are recipes for over two dozen incense mixtures and herbal scents included in Al-Azaf, the most popular Omani cookbook in shops and marketplaces.14 Those recipes bring together oud (aloe wood) oil with black musk, ambergris with sandalwood, saffron with snails, cloves with rose water, blending them into various divinely fragrant concoctions. But among all of the aromatics sold in the souk, frankincense is the one that they let stand alone. A soloist, its olfactory melody is too heavenly for Omanis to ever want it to be overdubbed.
Synesthesia. As I walk in and out of incense shops that share the same open corridor, I begin to feel as if I am stoned, for my senses are being bombarded with a mix of images unlike anything they had ever experienced before. This is literally a land of smoke and mirrors. The mirrors are placed to make the shops appear larger, to multiply the colored lights, and to catch the whirls of smoke rising from clay incense burners. Nearly every incense shop is stocked with fashionably shaped aspirators and decanters of perfumes, censers and smokers, rustic bags of dried incense, and bowls with glistening samples of both. But added to that is the harmonic intensity of oud music, voices speaking a dozen languages, and the memorable profiles of women in brilliantly colored silk gowns, dazzling jewelry, and gorgeous scarves. As half a dozen kinds of smoke from incense gradually fill my lungs, the world glimmering before me begins to seem like an illusion.
An elderly Somali Omani shopkeeper, her hands and lower arms aflame with intricate patterns inscribed with henna, notices my befuddlement. She smiles and with a fine British accent invites me into her little shop. She beckons me to come and sit so that I might learn to distinguish the five grades of lubān from one another. She says that she will show me how to vaporize them properly over glowing coals in a traditional clay incense burner rather than “burning away” much of their potency.
She explains that the differences among grades may at first seem too subtle to the uninitiated tourist, but that they are worth recognizing. The top grade, hojari fusoos, commands prices three to four times higher than that of the next level of quality, the nejdi. The trick of the shopkeeper is to discern quickly how much—or really, how little—a visitor actually knows about frankincense.
Feigning alarm, her almond-shaped eyes magnified by the delicate lines of kohl drawn around them, she notes how some of her competitors display low-grade “ore” that is roughly the same color and texture as hojari. In a whisper, she confides in me that there might even be some unscrupulous merchants who will try to market their nuggets of nejdi, or even lower-quality shazri, as hojari fusoos.
“They are out to take the shirt off of your back for a few pebbles of frankincense,” she frowns. She then swears to me that she has never perpetrated such an impropriety, and that I can place my trust in her henna-colored hands.
MAP 1. Spice trails of the Arabian Peninsula and Arabian Sea
I begin to daydream then, not fully hearing the rest of her sales pitch, but instead remembering little fragments of what historians had compiled about frankincense and spices in the ancient economies.
The best frankincense, hojari fusoos, or some comparable grade from the region of Yemen, cost the ancient Romans 6 denarii per pound. That was roughly the same as ginger, more than black pepper, and twice the price of cardamom. Myrrh was twice the price per volume at that time because it would dehydrate and thus shrink; however, it was never used in the quantities that the Romans transported and consumed frankincense. In late Roman times, the cost of transporting a camel-load of frankincense from the southern Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean was 680 to 1,000 denarii, more than five times the cost of living a year in Palestine during the same era. In exchange for frankincense, each year, goods worth close to 10 million denarii would flow back the seventeen hundred miles from the shores of the Mediterranean, or from Persia and India.15
For a desert region where less than one-thousandth of the land’s surface could be used to grow crops, it was frankincense that stimulated the flow of goods from better-watered regions in to Dhofar and the Hadhramaut. The Semitic tribes of Arabia Felix would trade their lubān, which the Romans called olibanum, for a range of material items that were beyond their capability to produce: silk sashes, muslin sheets, medicinal ointments, dry white wines, emmer wheat, copper vessels, and silver plates. Of course, small irrigated oases were scattered across Arabia Felix that provided most of the tribes with their dates, cereals, and some other cultivated foods, but trade in frankincense was what leveraged access to them for the nomads.
Until Arab and Phoenician seafarers gained a certain competence in maritime navigation, transport of frankincense and other goods over such long distances could be done only by camel. Dromedary camels appear to have been domesticated in the coastal settlements of eastern Arabia not far from present-day Salalah. They may have been initially managed as a wild resource for the medicinal value of their milk, which fends off microbial infections of the eye—just as frankincense offered its antiseptic lubān to treat irritations, cancers, and tumors in the eyes of the Semitic tribes there long before the era of Abraham. Clay figurines of camels made in Yemen close to three thousand years ago suggest that these creatures soon assumed the status of a keystone species in the Arab economy and an icon in its spirituality, for camels provided not only milk but also wool, meat, flammable dung, medicinal urine, leather, and transportation. Because a single adult camel can shoulder as much as 130 pounds of loaded goods and still cover twenty-two miles of desert a day, no other beast of burden could possibly hold its own against it when crossing windswept sands. Their convex backs enable camels to carry far more than horses over short distances, with loads of 650 pounds not uncommon.16
It is not surprising that the first appearance of frankincense well beyond its native range—in Egypt between three thousand and thirty-five hundred years ago—was about the time that camels were tamed and reliably used for long-distance transport. Among the nine hundred or so terms relating to camels in the Arabic language, one can find some wonderful metaphors that treat them as companions, gifts from Allah, and sailing vessels. Throughout much of their historical range, they were likened to “ships of the desert,” capable of navigating vast seas of sand like no other animal. Camels, spice caravans, and incense trade not only shared a common history but also launched the Semitic tribes onto a shared economic trajectory. No wonder prints of camel caravans and miniature replicas of dromedaries are scattered throughout the souks of Salalah.
The elderly Somali shopkeeper taps me on the shoulder. “Excuse me, kind sir. Are you . . .? You looked as though you were falling asleep. Do you want to purchase something from me before you go off to rest?”
I try to shake myself awake. I decide to purchase a quarter pound of hojari fusoos and a crudely decorated incense smoker from her, in part to avoid embarrassing myself any further.
“Please excuse me,” I reply, “I am tired. I have come a long way to be here,” I add, as I pay for the dreamy scent of frankincense.
I have been lucky enough to see where frankincense is found in the wild, how its resins are collected, and how it is still sold in souks in the very same port where it has been traded for millennia. It is clear that a little of the harvest could be bartered or sold for much more in the outer world, and this fact alone propelled the mountain talkers to engage in extra-local spice trade just as others began
